You don't have to make money, directly or otherwise, to have market share, nor do you have to make money to have an impact on your competition. And when discussing Windows' market share with regard to, say, desktop installations, no one discounts those installs that are pirated copies (most are in some parts of the world) because whether or not those installs made money for MS does not affect that fact that their OS is used on those machines.
For some people getting away with a cheat is more exhilarating than winning without. Not only did you win the race/whatever, but you outsmarted the officials too.
Wouldn't work for me, but I know several people who would be "that type".
MS's AV option might be practical. It has a much lower memory footprint than the other common options and from the group-tests I've seen its detection rate isn't disappointing either. I put it on an old 512Mb laptop of a friend when we rebuilt it after walware infection and it seemed efficient enough, though that was on XP rather then 7.
We wont have to hear about who did or didn't fail their drug tests anymore.
It would not work like that. You would still have people trying to win the "enhancement restricted" events with enhancements because it might be easier for them that way than competing against or the other drugged/modded competitors in the "anything goes" variants.
Unlike Vista, for the absolute basics (web browsing unless you are going to particularly complex web apps, text editing, file management, and not much else) Windows 7 is actually usable on 512Mb unless you have particularly slow drives (it will want to swap a good bit). I've seen it used on a netbook of that spec. I'd not recommend it, but it works.
There is no technical reason why you can't get DX11 effects on WinXP provided your video hardware supports it.
There are technical reasons for it not being easy to support though. The driver model for the graphics sub-system in XP is quite different, and there are differences in low-level memory management that mighh be significant too. Because DX is quite tightly coupled with those areas (whether this is a good thing is another discussion) it will be affected by such differences and may need different code paths to handle them and that extra jiggery-pokery would need aggressive testing. The time (and therefore cost) of supporting DX10+ on XP would most definitely not be trivial.
PHP will be around for decades more at least. Even though Perl had a fairly significant fall from grace (initially as people moved to PHP or Python web-side and Python for admin, with other environments like Rails taking a chunk of share too more recently) it is still going strong in some places. PHP will become less common as people move on to other stuff (Python, Rails, javascript through node and others, and so forth) especially when one or more of the other options hits the tipping point where it becomes commonly found in shared hosting environments, but I expect it'll never really go away.
but it is connected to the greatest image processing software in the universe
... that we know of. There might be better that we've not found on this planet, in fact there almost certainly is better for various definitions of better, before even considering elsewhere in the universe.
You might find that the 576 pixels gives the patients better vision than you'd imagine. They'll not be driving or reading any small-print, but our eyes are not massively high res to start with and the brain does a ton of work to scan them around to put the scene together and enhancing the result "post-production". Of course compared to blind even if it isn't all that good it'll still be a massively life changing improvement.
Just think: in a few decades time "you'll go blind" will no longer be a threat to 14 years olds...
Observe the Razorbeak as it tends so carefully to the fungal blooms; just the right bit from the yellow, then a swatch from the pink. Follow the Glow Mites as they gather and organize the fallen spores. What higher order guides their work? Mark my words: someone or something is managing the ecology of this planet.
Unfortunately the customers are sometimes as incompetent as the chipset vendors, and don't know what they're being sold.
Or who to blame... If it doesn't work with Windows it is seen as the manufacturer's fault (as they provided the drivers) but if it doesn't work under Linux it is the kernel dev's fault (as the user doesn't know that the drivers there were written by the manufacturer too) and it is they who are expected to fix the problem. I do not envy them that position!
Without him, Linux would turn in to PHP. Look what happened to that. PHP is plain awful now. It started off with a good idea, then all the amateurs took control and ruined it. You don't want that now, do you?
Really?!
I've not touched PHP for a few years, so I might be wrong about its current status, but from what I gather there have been significant improvements. Objects working properly for one. References too. References to objects specifically. When I was working on some stuff in PHP4 those areas were a mess. I'm also told that chunks of the standard library now have more normalized variants. This was starting when I left the arena, with data access libraries that implemented a generic API (for the most part, with extensions specific to a particular back-end where needed) starting to win over the old modules that offered massively inconsistent interfaces. DB access was not the only place where there was massive inconsistency: because of the organic way the project grew up until that point with each new module mirroring the base libraries API directly with no effort made towards consistency within PHP as a whole, the standard library was awash with it: no two things worked alike and I can't believe that hasn't improved any int he last X years (there were many unhappy about the situation at the time, even amongst those who were ardent PHP users and supporters).
Could you give examples of what is more awful now than it was back in PHP4 prior to PHP5 becoming mainstream?
They have to variants (model A and model B). The cheaper one was originally going to have 128Mb RAM (it will now have the same 256Mb). It will be missing a USB port (it will have one rather than two) and won't have any built-in networking (the model B has a 10/100 wired NIC). The Model A is not yet available at all though, so quoting the Pi as being a $25 machine is a little misleading for the time being.
It is more flexible than the old phone option though, especially for those of use who don't have one lying around.
* I'll run "full" Linux (or ?BSD) rather than Android being the only option (and not even the latest Android no doubt)
* Wired network access is possible
* A "proper" keyboard & mouse can be attached (I'm assuming the phone doesn't have a host-capable USB port)
* Other USB connected devices too for that matter
* Easy access to I/O channels for connecting non-USB things (such as motors and other custom electronics)
Of course if you have the phone hanging around you could try repurpose it, it would probably be a fun project if you are that way inclined, but I suspect the extra hassle would eat any saving from not buying a Pi or equivalent. A quick scan on eBay.co.uk suggests that you would be better off selling the old phone and putting the proceeds towards something like a Pi.
You are right that the phone does have some advantages over the Pi though (built in screen, built-in keyboard (IIRC the Dream was a slide keyboard unit?), neat little case, almost certainly smaller than a Pi+case,...) depending on what you are wanting it to do.
The basic thing to keep in mind if that your boss, or the client don't trust your effort / time estimations, agile won't work.
Herein lies one of my problems with what my people are calling Agile (everyone I talk to seems to have a slightly different, sometimes wildly different, idea of exactly what "agile" means - ATM it seems to me to be "what we've always done to an extent, but more formalized and with responsibility more evenly spread"). Our company/group is going through a very fast change at the moment (most of it for the better: resource for things we've been begging for resource for for years, better coordination/sharing between parts of the group, commitment to proper planning, and just general investment from up high to refresh+grow our people and equipment) and "agile" is one the BigThings.
I'm liking parts of it, but some of it grates (the terminology for a start: the next person who calls me a "scrum master" is getting rugby tackled or, if I'm having a bad day, pushed down the stairs).
One of the issues I'm having is that people are trusting my estimates too much IMO which pushes me out of my comfort zone quite a bit as I know that tracking and estimating time is very much not my forté. Though I think part of the problem is one step above my line manager, where there are a couple of people taking estimates too literally which seems to me to go against the methodology they are asking us to follow: they ask for a ball-park estimate, but then expect a detailed report if things take more or less time than that "guess" (and preparing that report, or just having meetings about it, eats into the next period's hours for someone). As it happens I've surprised myself by being fairly close to the mark most of the time thus far, when estimating my ability to get X done in a given timeframe, and other peoples' abilities to do the same, and including "coordination time", but I fully expect at some point soon there will be a massive underestimate (there have been some underestimates already, but some overestimates too and they've more-or-less cancelled out and where they didn't I pulled extra hours and made them look like they did) and excrement will be introduced to the air circulation device...
One of the things I'm not getting out of the change that I've been nagging about wanting for years is time to adequately document work so that later maintenance is less arduous. Tasks like that are considered and get the own "card", but those work items don't seem to gather any priority.
Though as I've expressed my concerns more than once I'm filing it under "things I can say 'I told you so' about when the time comes" for the time being. Having said that, the things that look much more positive in the future as a result of the investment/expansion/improvement are outweighing my concerns at the moment - I'll take a long look at the situation again when I can see where some more of the many balls that are up int he air right now are likely to land.
If you really are dumb enough to groom a child over a fucking chat application, you deserve the prison rape coming your way. Ever seen 'To Catch a Predator'?
The problem I see isn't that (I agree with you in fact: if some does that sort of thing and discussed it via my servers and I somehow knew then damn right the police would find out).
The problem is false positives, and the fact that the system is probably pretty much automated (or what little human scrutiny each report might get is performed by a minimum wage worker who may not even have a great grasp of the language you are communicating in, or at least its local colloquialisms (especially in instances where slang use of common words completely inverts their meaning)) so false positives will get to the action end of the system with little or no due process. What happens when this scanner picks out a collection of unrelated things you say jokingly as potentially being a threat to national security? We've already had people refused entry to America because of daft tweets and someone in the UK sent to prison for joking about an airport bomb in a tweet, so that really isn't terribly far fetched.
For another example of this, check the click baiting headline on the article below this one on/.'s current front page:
Samsung Blames Galaxy SIII Burn On "External Energy Source"
Where the actual story is "Samsung not to be blame for every idiot thing someone could do with/to their products" rather than "Samsung devices potentially dangerous, Samsung attempt to pass the buck".
A fairer title might have been "Idiot puts phone in microwave, phone and phone's manufacturer found unlike to be to blame".
Depending on how you read the title as it currently stands (Samsung Blames Galaxy SIII Burn On "External Energy Source") it could suggest there is a question of Samsung being to blame and that they are trying to pass the buck.
If you are using 100W for that sort of job, you've done something wrong.
There are many devices that draw no more than 15W which are perfectly capable of providing basic routing for 100mbit (more than most internet connections can channel). You might need to bump the power requirements up a fair chunk for GigE, wireless, and if you need the CPU to handle the encryption of VPN traffic (rather than just pass it through), but still 100W is far more than you should need.
The cost of creating and maintaining your own setup is time, not power. That and finding kit that fits nicely in your rack or other kit arrangement, if you are not doing this for a home or small office arrangement where such things don't matter.
A lot of the problem people have with PHP stems from the fact that it is ubiquitous and easy to program badly in. A fair number of people have had the joy of debugging or securing some terrible PHP code and that flavours their opinion of the platform.
It wasn't without significant problems beyond that too though. The way objects operated was rather shite in v4 (I'm told this has been improved a lot, but people who have not tried a later version will not have adjusted their views accordingly) for instance, and the standard library while impressively proportioned was incredibly inconsistent (again, this I hope is likely to have improved since I last played in that area) due to its initial organic, unplanned, development.
Of course another reason for the level of dislike shown by some is that in some circles you can look clever by having reasons to dislike something the people you want to look more clever than use...
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to make money, directly or otherwise, to have market share, nor do you have to make money to have an impact on your competition. And when discussing Windows' market share with regard to, say, desktop installations, no one discounts those installs that are pirated copies (most are in some parts of the world) because whether or not those installs made money for MS does not affect that fact that their OS is used on those machines.
For some people getting away with a cheat is more exhilarating than winning without. Not only did you win the race/whatever, but you outsmarted the officials too.
Wouldn't work for me, but I know several people who would be "that type".
MS's AV option might be practical. It has a much lower memory footprint than the other common options and from the group-tests I've seen its detection rate isn't disappointing either. I put it on an old 512Mb laptop of a friend when we rebuilt it after walware infection and it seemed efficient enough, though that was on XP rather then 7.
We wont have to hear about who did or didn't fail their drug tests anymore.
It would not work like that. You would still have people trying to win the "enhancement restricted" events with enhancements because it might be easier for them that way than competing against or the other drugged/modded competitors in the "anything goes" variants.
Unlike Vista, for the absolute basics (web browsing unless you are going to particularly complex web apps, text editing, file management, and not much else) Windows 7 is actually usable on 512Mb unless you have particularly slow drives (it will want to swap a good bit). I've seen it used on a netbook of that spec. I'd not recommend it, but it works.
There is no technical reason why you can't get DX11 effects on WinXP provided your video hardware supports it.
There are technical reasons for it not being easy to support though. The driver model for the graphics sub-system in XP is quite different, and there are differences in low-level memory management that mighh be significant too. Because DX is quite tightly coupled with those areas (whether this is a good thing is another discussion) it will be affected by such differences and may need different code paths to handle them and that extra jiggery-pokery would need aggressive testing. The time (and therefore cost) of supporting DX10+ on XP would most definitely not be trivial.
PHP will be around for decades more at least. Even though Perl had a fairly significant fall from grace (initially as people moved to PHP or Python web-side and Python for admin, with other environments like Rails taking a chunk of share too more recently) it is still going strong in some places. PHP will become less common as people move on to other stuff (Python, Rails, javascript through node and others, and so forth) especially when one or more of the other options hits the tipping point where it becomes commonly found in shared hosting environments, but I expect it'll never really go away.
but it is connected to the greatest image processing software in the universe
... that we know of. There might be better that we've not found on this planet, in fact there almost certainly is better for various definitions of better, before even considering elsewhere in the universe.
You might find that the 576 pixels gives the patients better vision than you'd imagine. They'll not be driving or reading any small-print, but our eyes are not massively high res to start with and the brain does a ton of work to scan them around to put the scene together and enhancing the result "post-production". Of course compared to blind even if it isn't all that good it'll still be a massively life changing improvement.
Just think: in a few decades time "you'll go blind" will no longer be a threat to 14 years olds...
I know it isn't good. That is part of why I no longer touch it. But the previous poster suggested it was now worse than it was back when I did use it.
(while being utterly ignored by all the happy people partying)
While sensible hedonists used the confusions as an excuse for an extra large party two years running.
Observe the Razorbeak as it tends so carefully to the fungal blooms; just the right bit from the yellow, then a swatch from the pink. Follow the Glow Mites as they gather and organize the fallen spores. What higher order guides their work? Mark my words: someone or something is managing the ecology of this planet.
-- Lady Deirdre Skye, "Planet Dreams"
Unfortunately the customers are sometimes as incompetent as the chipset vendors, and don't know what they're being sold.
Or who to blame... If it doesn't work with Windows it is seen as the manufacturer's fault (as they provided the drivers) but if it doesn't work under Linux it is the kernel dev's fault (as the user doesn't know that the drivers there were written by the manufacturer too) and it is they who are expected to fix the problem. I do not envy them that position!
Without him, Linux would turn in to PHP. Look what happened to that. PHP is plain awful now. It started off with a good idea, then all the amateurs took control and ruined it. You don't want that now, do you?
Really?!
I've not touched PHP for a few years, so I might be wrong about its current status, but from what I gather there have been significant improvements. Objects working properly for one. References too. References to objects specifically. When I was working on some stuff in PHP4 those areas were a mess. I'm also told that chunks of the standard library now have more normalized variants. This was starting when I left the arena, with data access libraries that implemented a generic API (for the most part, with extensions specific to a particular back-end where needed) starting to win over the old modules that offered massively inconsistent interfaces. DB access was not the only place where there was massive inconsistency: because of the organic way the project grew up until that point with each new module mirroring the base libraries API directly with no effort made towards consistency within PHP as a whole, the standard library was awash with it: no two things worked alike and I can't believe that hasn't improved any int he last X years (there were many unhappy about the situation at the time, even amongst those who were ardent PHP users and supporters).
Could you give examples of what is more awful now than it was back in PHP4 prior to PHP5 becoming mainstream?
They have to variants (model A and model B). The cheaper one was originally going to have 128Mb RAM (it will now have the same 256Mb). It will be missing a USB port (it will have one rather than two) and won't have any built-in networking (the model B has a 10/100 wired NIC). The Model A is not yet available at all though, so quoting the Pi as being a $25 machine is a little misleading for the time being.
It is more flexible than the old phone option though, especially for those of use who don't have one lying around.
...) depending on what you are wanting it to do.
* I'll run "full" Linux (or ?BSD) rather than Android being the only option (and not even the latest Android no doubt)
* Wired network access is possible
* A "proper" keyboard & mouse can be attached (I'm assuming the phone doesn't have a host-capable USB port)
* Other USB connected devices too for that matter
* Easy access to I/O channels for connecting non-USB things (such as motors and other custom electronics)
Of course if you have the phone hanging around you could try repurpose it, it would probably be a fun project if you are that way inclined, but I suspect the extra hassle would eat any saving from not buying a Pi or equivalent. A quick scan on eBay.co.uk suggests that you would be better off selling the old phone and putting the proceeds towards something like a Pi.
You are right that the phone does have some advantages over the Pi though (built in screen, built-in keyboard (IIRC the Dream was a slide keyboard unit?), neat little case, almost certainly smaller than a Pi+case,
Maybe I'm loud about the things I'm good at!
The basic thing to keep in mind if that your boss, or the client don't trust your effort / time estimations, agile won't work.
Herein lies one of my problems with what my people are calling Agile (everyone I talk to seems to have a slightly different, sometimes wildly different, idea of exactly what "agile" means - ATM it seems to me to be "what we've always done to an extent, but more formalized and with responsibility more evenly spread"). Our company/group is going through a very fast change at the moment (most of it for the better: resource for things we've been begging for resource for for years, better coordination/sharing between parts of the group, commitment to proper planning, and just general investment from up high to refresh+grow our people and equipment) and "agile" is one the BigThings.
I'm liking parts of it, but some of it grates (the terminology for a start: the next person who calls me a "scrum master" is getting rugby tackled or, if I'm having a bad day, pushed down the stairs).
One of the issues I'm having is that people are trusting my estimates too much IMO which pushes me out of my comfort zone quite a bit as I know that tracking and estimating time is very much not my forté. Though I think part of the problem is one step above my line manager, where there are a couple of people taking estimates too literally which seems to me to go against the methodology they are asking us to follow: they ask for a ball-park estimate, but then expect a detailed report if things take more or less time than that "guess" (and preparing that report, or just having meetings about it, eats into the next period's hours for someone). As it happens I've surprised myself by being fairly close to the mark most of the time thus far, when estimating my ability to get X done in a given timeframe, and other peoples' abilities to do the same, and including "coordination time", but I fully expect at some point soon there will be a massive underestimate (there have been some underestimates already, but some overestimates too and they've more-or-less cancelled out and where they didn't I pulled extra hours and made them look like they did) and excrement will be introduced to the air circulation device...
One of the things I'm not getting out of the change that I've been nagging about wanting for years is time to adequately document work so that later maintenance is less arduous. Tasks like that are considered and get the own "card", but those work items don't seem to gather any priority.
Though as I've expressed my concerns more than once I'm filing it under "things I can say 'I told you so' about when the time comes" for the time being. Having said that, the things that look much more positive in the future as a result of the investment/expansion/improvement are outweighing my concerns at the moment - I'll take a long look at the situation again when I can see where some more of the many balls that are up int he air right now are likely to land.
If you really are dumb enough to groom a child over a fucking chat application, you deserve the prison rape coming your way. Ever seen 'To Catch a Predator'?
The problem I see isn't that (I agree with you in fact: if some does that sort of thing and discussed it via my servers and I somehow knew then damn right the police would find out).
The problem is false positives, and the fact that the system is probably pretty much automated (or what little human scrutiny each report might get is performed by a minimum wage worker who may not even have a great grasp of the language you are communicating in, or at least its local colloquialisms (especially in instances where slang use of common words completely inverts their meaning)) so false positives will get to the action end of the system with little or no due process. What happens when this scanner picks out a collection of unrelated things you say jokingly as potentially being a threat to national security? We've already had people refused entry to America because of daft tweets and someone in the UK sent to prison for joking about an airport bomb in a tweet, so that really isn't terribly far fetched.
Samsung Blames Galaxy SIII Burn On "External Energy Source"
Where the actual story is "Samsung not to be blame for every idiot thing someone could do with/to their products" rather than "Samsung devices potentially dangerous, Samsung attempt to pass the buck".
A fairer title might have been "Idiot puts phone in microwave, phone and phone's manufacturer found unlike to be to blame".
Depending on how you read the title as it currently stands (Samsung Blames Galaxy SIII Burn On "External Energy Source") it could suggest there is a question of Samsung being to blame and that they are trying to pass the buck.
If you are using 100W for that sort of job, you've done something wrong.
There are many devices that draw no more than 15W which are perfectly capable of providing basic routing for 100mbit (more than most internet connections can channel). You might need to bump the power requirements up a fair chunk for GigE, wireless, and if you need the CPU to handle the encryption of VPN traffic (rather than just pass it through), but still 100W is far more than you should need.
The cost of creating and maintaining your own setup is time, not power. That and finding kit that fits nicely in your rack or other kit arrangement, if you are not doing this for a home or small office arrangement where such things don't matter.
I'll call BS on "3rd degree" burns - to not notice before it got that bad the laptop would need to basically combust.
But a little scorching on a bare leg is definitely possible, and I've had laptops that carried explicit warnings about that sort of thing.
You seem to be errantly conflating "true geek" with "anal self-important elitist prick".
Many geeks use Ubuntu as there are various places where it is the right tool (or at least one of the appropriate options) for the job.
A lot of the problem people have with PHP stems from the fact that it is ubiquitous and easy to program badly in. A fair number of people have had the joy of debugging or securing some terrible PHP code and that flavours their opinion of the platform.
It wasn't without significant problems beyond that too though. The way objects operated was rather shite in v4 (I'm told this has been improved a lot, but people who have not tried a later version will not have adjusted their views accordingly) for instance, and the standard library while impressively proportioned was incredibly inconsistent (again, this I hope is likely to have improved since I last played in that area) due to its initial organic, unplanned, development.
Of course another reason for the level of dislike shown by some is that in some circles you can look clever by having reasons to dislike something the people you want to look more clever than use...